Failing to remember a relative at a family's yearly get together or a person's name after seeing them only once can be a common occurrence. At times, this can be an embarrassing moment, particularly, if the relative or acquaintance remembers your name the next time you meet. About all you can do is say “hello.” In addition, it is also an unfortunate occurrence when you meet someone for the first time, get their name, and then fail to remember it during the remainder of the conversion.
Biometric analysis consists of identifying an individual (for the remainder of this application, an “individual” will be used to imply the word “target” due to the personal nature of the “target”)—by analyzing a distinguishing element of the individual. Biometrics can include fingerprints, retinal analysis, DNA analysis, voice and facial features to name a few. Facial recognition and voice recognition are two examples of biometrics that has experienced widespread use.
Facial recognition is a well know and studied technique. It has been used by the Government, Banks and other institutions to search for and find criminals, terrorists, and wanted individuals. The success rate of identifying a criminal, terrorist, or wanted individual using a target database is currently fairly low. This occurs because the recognition device must be able to identify a single individual that is in the targeted database against potentially the population of the United States (300 Million people).
For instance, anyone entering the airports, train station and other forms of transportation is a sub-set of the 300 Million sample space. The targeted database may contain thousands of suspected terrorists, etc. The process of matching an individual to this database is a time consuming one—even with state of the art technology. Large mainframes are requires to perform the search. Because of this, these tools to identify an individual in the target database against the large sample space requires rooms filled with processors and memory storage elements. Furthermore, this database is tied to other locations in the country and the information is shared.
Several previous inventions address the problem of facial recognition. One, U.S. Pat. No. 5,835,616, issued Nov. 10, 1998 describes a two stage process for identifying a face in a digital image. A Second, U.S. Pat. No. 5,842,194, issued Nov. 24, 1998 describes a way of using fuzzy logic to identify faces. This can include a multi-step process. A third, U.S. Pat. No. 5,991,429, issued Nov. 23, 1999 describes a facial recognition system that can identify an individual even if they have on a disguise. All of the previous patents indicate that facial recognition is a well established procedure.
Several previous Pre-grant Publications also address the problem of biometric collection and comparison including facial recognition as well as some applications of facial recognition. One, Pub. No. U.S. 2004/0086157, published on May 6, 2004 describes a method of capturing biometric information (voice, for example) and comparing it to a registered information memory to help identify a person. A second one, Pub. No. U.S. 2004/0151347 published on Aug. 5, 2004 describes a facial recognition system that can be incorporated into dolls, games, anti-theft systems and drowsiness detection.
All of the previously mentioned patents and publications indicate that biometric techniques are well know. In addition, one PGPUG indicates several applications that can utilize the biometric technique to offer advantages to potential products.
One aspect missing from the applications is using biometric data to identify an individual to prevent an embarrassing moment of not being able to recall their name. This invention shows how the embarrassing moment can be overcome.